Recent content in where does this go on davepedu.com
There is an American folk tale about a man named John Henry. It dates to the mid 19th century, a time during which America was rapidly industrializing and the use of steam power was picking up… Well, steam. Being a folklore tale, there are many different variations of it, though, most examples describe him as a man employed on the construction of railroads. His specific role is often…
My personal website has existed in some form since the late 2000s, and like many hobby projects, it has been rebuilt far more times than strictly necessary. My taste in tech stacks has changed over time, and each version reflects whatever I was experimenting with at the time. These are some of thee iterations it has gone through over the years, and what is to come: 2011 - WordPress Early 2012 - A…
Redis is a widely used and extremely fast cache server. Redis supports high availability out-of-the-box, but requires a cluster-aware client library to accomplish it. In this project, I explore making cluster-unaware clients compatible with highly available Redis. High availability What is high availability? First, let’s cover a few basic concepts. Computer hardware and software are not…
Kickstart and Preseed are tools for automatically installing Linux distributions such as Ubuntu. Installing new copies of Linux can be time-consuming, especially if you must do so from a ISO image. These tools automate the install process. From the Ubuntu documentation: Many system administrators would prefer to use an automated installation method to install Ubuntu on their machines. The…
I’m a long-time reader and participant of the Reddit.com Subreddits /r/Datahoarder and /r/OpenDirectories . As both of these deal with retrieval and archival of data and information, wget is a wildly popular tool within these communities. For the unfamiliar, an “open directory” is a directory on a website where there is no index file. Since there’s no content to serve, most…
I recently encountered some odd behavior in nginx involving file upload sizes. Nginx has long had a client_max_body_size setting which controls how large of an HTTP POST or file upload the server will accept by comparing to the Content-Length header. Attempting to send a request larger than this results in a 413 Request Entity Too Large error from the server. But is this always the case? For…
Earlier this year, I traveled from my home in California to the Isle of Man, which is a 35 mile long island in the Irish Sea, known for its motorsports events. The Isle of Man is a self-governing British Crown Dependency, meaning they are effectively their own country, though they technically belong to the British monarchy. The Isle of Man is most well known for the Isle Of Man Tourist Trophy - a…
I’ve ran this blog in its current form for about 5 years now. It runs on Drupal 7, which while still current and supported, dated in quite a few ways. Drupal has since released Drupal 8, which includes a massive overhaul to the internals and theme layer. I’m undecided as to if I want to upgrade the site to Drupal 8, as it would effectively require a re-structuring and re-write.
I recently came across the source code of a browser-based game I wrote around 2005, when I would have been 15 years old. While the original database structure was unfortunately lost, I managed to piece together a working version by looking at existing queries in the source code. With this, I was able to get the game running again! In this post, we’ll look at what a naive PHP developer can…
Recently, I came across the concept of SSI - “Single System Image” - Linux clustering. In short, Single System Image is an approach to clustering where many generic Linux computers, running a modified kernel, present themselves as one larger computer with access to the combined sum of all the underlying systems’ RAM, CPU cores, and other resources. It was a useful technique…
This blog - and some of my other sites - have finally been made secure, with some new TLS certificates courtesy of Let’s Encrypt . Browsing of my blog is now somewhat safer to network traffic inspection!
I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area almost 3 years ago now. Having grown up in a small town (~2000 people) and gone to school in a small city (Rochester metropolitan area, New York ~1,000,000), it was not unexpectedly quite the shocking transition. Most of my observations of difference are fairly mundane - traffic patterns are different, more timid in some ways, and more aggressive in others.…
I host my projects on a dedicated server rented from OVH , I’m a huge VMware fan, so I’ve used their free product, the ESXi Hypervisor , to cram lots of virtual machines inside my one server. Since not all my virtual machines need internet-facing IPs and ESXi has only basic NAT capability, an easy solution here is running a pfSense install as a NAT router, as a virtual machine.…
I’ve been a long time user of 1Password , a password vault by AgileBits. However, it only supports OS X and Windows; which is a problem for Linux desktop converts like myself. Their desktop application - a very nice app and also required for the browser extension - is only for Windows and OS X. AgileBits also offers 1Password Families which does support Linux, but you lose control over where…
In a previous post , I described some of my early approaches to building a NAS for my home. In summary, I decided to use Linux software raid formatted with Linux’s built-in ext3 format. This setup worked, but left me with three main problems: Volume size limitations: ext3 is capable of handling a maximum volume size of 16TB, when formatted with a 4kb block size. It is theoretically possible…
I’m not a fan of losing data, so I always have some sort of redundant storage at my disposal. At present I possess over 10TB of irreplaceable data, code, photographs, etc, (and much more replaceable data - though at an inconvenience) and housing that data is no easy task. Be it for backups, media storage, or even temp space, having a huge pool of “safe” storage is always a useful…
Update 04/08/2019: I’ve had trouble with this method on newer versions of Subsonic and since the original technique was kind of bad - it more or less triggers crash recovery - I decided to take another look. I ended up finding the hsqldb-utils package, which includes some command-line utilities to manage HSQLDB databases. Unfortunately, this package doesn’t use the same version of…
I recently acquired a low-end 3d printer (0.3mm extrusion head) and after a few practice prints I decided to put my new skills to the test. I wanted to create a Raspberry Pi case, but I thought that would be a little boring. So the idea I settled on was creating something akin to a blade server - an enclosure that takes care of power and LAN distribution, that houses several Pis. Overkill?…
I bought some USB to TTL adapters on the cheap from China. The OS X driver was a little difficult to track down, but this thread cracked it: http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=261375.0 : Okay, drivers for mac do exist. I always see www.wch-ic.com for the driver, but now I searched for “ch341ser_mac.zip” and found www.wch.cn The mac driver is here :…
As mentioned in my last post, I’ve been learning up electronics with the Arduino. I found a few 5 by 7 LED matrices at a local surplus store, pictured below, so I figured another fun beginner project would be creating a clone of pong using a few of these for the screen. After some quick research - googling the part number - I found a datasheet, read it, and learned that the LEDs in these…
I’ve been learning electronics and playing with an Arduino lately. I realized today I have a functional, but worn mostly out, Nintendo 64 joystick. For an electronics beginner like me, it would be a fun challenge to figure out how it works. On a side note: I have a spare joystick because I replaced the ones in my Nintendo 64 controllers with a redesigned and improved replacement stick. The…
In 2014, I graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and shortly moved to the Bay Area, California. I drove my car, filled with all of my possessions, from New York to California. These are some of the sights I saw along the way. First stop! Our first stop was at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, where we saw the 1911 Marmon “Wasp”, winner of the first Indianapolis…
Anyone who remembers watching cable TV also remembers the DVR - Digital Video Recorder - a device that lets you record live TV and save it for later playback. It’s useful for catching episodes of shows that air when you are busy or sporting events overseas that air late at night for your timezone. Well, I listen to a handful of shows that only appear on live internet radio, and I wanted a…
Coda 2 (Previously, just Coda) has been my “daily driver” suite for web development for around 4 years now. It’s an absolutely wonderful editor by Panic, and well worth the price tag in my opinion. It has an editor, (s)ftp client, git client, terminal, mysql database manager, and a whole lot more all in one package. My workflow when developing a Drupal-based website is usually…
A website Project Lead The Way Website, where the Rochester Institute of Technology serves as New York State’s National Affiliate. This website has since been decommissioned and replaced with an updated design, but my work may still be viewed via archive.org .
A massive Drupal website, that took us nearly two months to design and develop! It’s fully responsive, has some great animation and attention to detail, and a good number of photos from previous events at RIT. This website has since been decommissioned and replaced with an updated design, but my work may still be viewed via archive.org .
The RIT Board of Trustees Intranet Portal is a CodeIgniter based web application that I designed and developed. It is an intranet website that is used to disseminate meeting materials for the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Board of Trustees meetings, as well as poll its members for attendance, feedback, etc. Code from this project was re-used for another project, the RIT…
Another beautiful Drupal website, this time for RIT’s Center for Urban Entrepreneurship in downtown Rochester. This one was designed in-house at RIT Production Services , with a nice Responsive theme for mobile phones and tablets as well. This website has since been decommissioned and replaced with an updated design, but my work may still be viewed via archive.org .
Last November, I had the opportunity to visit the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, while visiting relatives living in the area. I had never been there before, so I went for it! I may be a tech geek, but these amazing machines fascinate me. The sheer amount of research, time, and trial-and-error fueling these machines is simply incredible. Staring at the results of the most advanced transportation…
This was actually a project I completed about a year prior, but we decided to revisit it to update the site and add responsive design features - try the site on a smartphone, it’s excellent! The layout was designed in house and I did 100% of the development work. The old layout dated back to 2002, so it was obvious this site needed a refresh! It’s amazing how much different the web…
The Innovative Learning Institute at RIT is a new department, under the Center for Multidisciplinary Studies branch. The layout is very similar to the CMS website, and was also designed by Dumbwaiter Design . This website has since been decommissioned and replaced with an updated design, but my work may still be viewed via archive.org .
Every October, the ski resort at Whiteface Mountain has a small Oktoberfest. Traditional German music, food, beer, and demonstrations are featured, and many local vendors come to show off their homemade crafts. This is the first time I’ve gone in many years, and the first time I went being older than 21! It’s a ton of fun and is definitely worth checking out if you’re in the area…
The CMS Website was created for RIT’s Center for Multidisciplenary Studies, and was graphically designed by Dumbwaiter Design and developed by myself. It’s based on Drupal to allow the CMS staff to easily create and post content to the website. This project was a new challenge - typically, all of our designs were created in-house. Which is very convenient, if I need anything changed or…
Benson Mines is a long-abandoned iron mine near Watertown, NY. The mine was shut down in 1978 and the buildings and have been left to nature ever since. It’s a great visualization of nature slowly reclaiming it’s land. I stopped by with a friend on a rainy day on my way back to Rochester from the Adirondacks. The rain was moderate at times and the buildings were alive with the sound of…
Hello! Welcome to my blog. This is a test blog post to help develop the system.
A website showcasing the work of mid century artist Frans Wildenhain, built on WordPress. Features a prominent art photo gallery, and a WordPress blog. Additionally, this website won a Silver Award , given by The w3 Awards in its Best of the Web competition. The Frans Wildenhain Exhibition website was designed to feature the fall 2012 exhibition of mid-century modern pottery by Bauhaus-trained…
content All text, images, and other media on this website are original works, unless otherwise noted. Any third-party material is used with attribution. No content on this website was produced using Artificial Intelligence. attributions Site generated with Hugo . Hugo theme adapted from re-Terminal by Mirus .
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